I’ve been thinking of writing an article on the EA Forum for a couple months now, something of a companion article to this one, about cities which have the potential to become EA hubs. This is a different angle of attack than the thinking which has been poured into EA hubs which have are explicitly researched for their low cost-of-living potential. There are a few cities around the world which have the potential to become EA hubs in the same way Oxford or SF are, even if they’re not as advantageous as ones in countries with drastically lower living costs. Still, though, it can’t be anything but useful to be at least be aware of these options. Other things being equal, as an ecosystem, if EA could or would benefit from a greater diversity of hubs to set roots in, it’s good to be aware of that.
AFAICT, the extant, bona fide EA hubs are:
Oxford (with offshoots in London and Cambridge)
Basel, Switzerland
the Bay Area (albeit a large area where their are nuclei around Stanford, Berkeley/Oakland, and San Francisco itself, each of which are at least 1-hour transport away from each other)
Melbourne
Other potential EA hubs include:
Boston, Massachusettes
Vancouver, Canada (where I live)
Berlin
Seattle, Washington
I imagine there are a few more which would qualify. Let me explain what I mean by ‘qualify’. Ideally, what I would do is determine what are the common factors between SF, Oxford, Basel, and Melbourne. These would be factors that would, if not directly precipitate the generation of an EA hub, be highly correlated with its rise. Then, I would figure out which other cities share those factors, and speculate/encourage those cities to develop other common factors, such that their potential to become an EA hub is more robust. Such factors include:
at least one, and usually multiple, EA organizations
the organization of at least one, often multiple, local meetups which themselves sport ~10 regular attendees, outside of the local EA orgs
sharehousing between EAs, or otherwise factors which facilitate incidental social cohesion among otherwise professional relationships
a local culture amenable to either startups and/or social entrepreneurship, such that the city itself as an attractor for the sorts of people drawn as EA, and the city can feed the growth of the EA hub.
The biggest problem here is that whatever it is in the culture of hip cities which draw socially conscientious millenials, that lends themselves to becoming EA hubs, also draws enough people that it makes them very expensive. London is the most expensive city in England, and I’m guessing for a university town, Oxford isn’t too cheap either. SF is the most expensive city in the U.S. I hear Melbourne is one of the most expensive cities in Australia. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada. Maybe only second to New York, Boston is one of the costliest cities to live in on the American east coast. I know little of Basel, but based on the above, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s expensive to live in.
I think i know what’s going on. EA hubs tend to be cities full of people open-minded to experimenting with cutting-edge innovation. Effective altruism is just the mindset of ‘cutting-edge thinking’ applied to philanthropy and do-gooding. To get a city with cutting-edge innovation and risk-neutral young people, though, comes with high costs of living. This isn’t exactly a scientific theory of how EA hubs rise and fall, but I think the relationships here are pretty clear-cut.
The curse of founding a new EA hub is that the places, the local cultures, in which one would ideally want to seed an EA hub are also the most expensive ones. If an exodus of EAs moved to a new city in the developing world, bereft of the ‘startup culture’ mindset, we might have to build that culture from the ground up, all by ourselves. That seems like it would have high fixed costs, and be very hard to do.
This is very similar to my model of the highly active EA places are expensive problem.
I suspect that creating the culture from the ground up would not be extremely hard, though it would impose a fixed cost/require some dedicated people to push it forward. Primarily because we could bring people in who are already familiar with relevant mindsets/ideas rather than having to spread them to locals where we arrive. I would expect a group on the order of ~15-30 awesome people (+low-cost, +high quality of life) to start to be attractive to many from around the world, even if the wider culture of the country/city was not particularly involved in ‘cutting-edge thinking’. To start with only those okay with a relatively small/tight social circle would join, but as it grew people who wanted a wider circle of interaction would be happier. Most people don’t need a huge social circle, so long as the wider culture is not actively hostile towards us and we were careful to build a healthy internal social environment early on I think it’d be okay.
This is quite a different project to setting up in a place which already has a bunch of EAs, but it seems doable to me. Rough steps: figure out what people want, gather names, and pick a location, then find funding, scout the location, and pick an exact building, then bring a founding team over (~4-10 people?) to do initial setup, then start bringing more people who want to be part of that kind of group over to help and live. Once you have a seed community and a schelling point for interacting with it expansion is relatively straightforward (people rent nearby, similar co-living spaces pop up, etc).
I’ve been thinking of writing an article on the EA Forum for a couple months now, something of a companion article to this one, about cities which have the potential to become EA hubs. This is a different angle of attack than the thinking which has been poured into EA hubs which have are explicitly researched for their low cost-of-living potential. There are a few cities around the world which have the potential to become EA hubs in the same way Oxford or SF are, even if they’re not as advantageous as ones in countries with drastically lower living costs. Still, though, it can’t be anything but useful to be at least be aware of these options. Other things being equal, as an ecosystem, if EA could or would benefit from a greater diversity of hubs to set roots in, it’s good to be aware of that.
AFAICT, the extant, bona fide EA hubs are:
Oxford (with offshoots in London and Cambridge)
Basel, Switzerland
the Bay Area (albeit a large area where their are nuclei around Stanford, Berkeley/Oakland, and San Francisco itself, each of which are at least 1-hour transport away from each other)
Melbourne
Other potential EA hubs include:
Boston, Massachusettes
Vancouver, Canada (where I live)
Berlin
Seattle, Washington
I imagine there are a few more which would qualify. Let me explain what I mean by ‘qualify’. Ideally, what I would do is determine what are the common factors between SF, Oxford, Basel, and Melbourne. These would be factors that would, if not directly precipitate the generation of an EA hub, be highly correlated with its rise. Then, I would figure out which other cities share those factors, and speculate/encourage those cities to develop other common factors, such that their potential to become an EA hub is more robust. Such factors include:
at least one, and usually multiple, EA organizations
the organization of at least one, often multiple, local meetups which themselves sport ~10 regular attendees, outside of the local EA orgs
sharehousing between EAs, or otherwise factors which facilitate incidental social cohesion among otherwise professional relationships
a local culture amenable to either startups and/or social entrepreneurship, such that the city itself as an attractor for the sorts of people drawn as EA, and the city can feed the growth of the EA hub.
The biggest problem here is that whatever it is in the culture of hip cities which draw socially conscientious millenials, that lends themselves to becoming EA hubs, also draws enough people that it makes them very expensive. London is the most expensive city in England, and I’m guessing for a university town, Oxford isn’t too cheap either. SF is the most expensive city in the U.S. I hear Melbourne is one of the most expensive cities in Australia. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada. Maybe only second to New York, Boston is one of the costliest cities to live in on the American east coast. I know little of Basel, but based on the above, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s expensive to live in.
I think i know what’s going on. EA hubs tend to be cities full of people open-minded to experimenting with cutting-edge innovation. Effective altruism is just the mindset of ‘cutting-edge thinking’ applied to philanthropy and do-gooding. To get a city with cutting-edge innovation and risk-neutral young people, though, comes with high costs of living. This isn’t exactly a scientific theory of how EA hubs rise and fall, but I think the relationships here are pretty clear-cut.
The curse of founding a new EA hub is that the places, the local cultures, in which one would ideally want to seed an EA hub are also the most expensive ones. If an exodus of EAs moved to a new city in the developing world, bereft of the ‘startup culture’ mindset, we might have to build that culture from the ground up, all by ourselves. That seems like it would have high fixed costs, and be very hard to do.
Here are a few data sources for finding cities with a culture or sub-culture that has EA-potential:
Rankings of startup hubs: http://blog.compass.co/the-2015-global-startup-ecosystem-ranking-is-live/
Inglehart-Welzel cultural map using World Values Survey data—EAs would probably fit in best in high self-expression, high secular-rational cultures.
Places where digital nomads tend to congregate. My comment here contains a list of some top digital nomad hubs.
This is very similar to my model of the highly active EA places are expensive problem.
I suspect that creating the culture from the ground up would not be extremely hard, though it would impose a fixed cost/require some dedicated people to push it forward. Primarily because we could bring people in who are already familiar with relevant mindsets/ideas rather than having to spread them to locals where we arrive. I would expect a group on the order of ~15-30 awesome people (+low-cost, +high quality of life) to start to be attractive to many from around the world, even if the wider culture of the country/city was not particularly involved in ‘cutting-edge thinking’. To start with only those okay with a relatively small/tight social circle would join, but as it grew people who wanted a wider circle of interaction would be happier. Most people don’t need a huge social circle, so long as the wider culture is not actively hostile towards us and we were careful to build a healthy internal social environment early on I think it’d be okay.
This is quite a different project to setting up in a place which already has a bunch of EAs, but it seems doable to me. Rough steps: figure out what people want, gather names, and pick a location, then find funding, scout the location, and pick an exact building, then bring a founding team over (~4-10 people?) to do initial setup, then start bringing more people who want to be part of that kind of group over to help and live. Once you have a seed community and a schelling point for interacting with it expansion is relatively straightforward (people rent nearby, similar co-living spaces pop up, etc).